Loving your work. Thought i'd share my pin2000 project with you guys.

I've developed my own complete tournament system with full compatibility to the existing pinball software that allows anyone with a Revenge from Mars game to particiapate in a worldwide tournament from the comfort of their own home. All you need is a network card in your rfm to get started, and a barcode reader for full participation.

To find out more visit my site http://www.mypinballs.com/tournament/ or drop me an email. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Also, I'd love to add new features for users of your system in the future by using the API you mention.

Cheers

Very nice work.

I posted a link to your site about a month ago I believe. It's somewhere around here...

p.s. anyone else get hit by the horrible stomach flu going around :p

applejuice wrote:Loving your work. Thought i'd share my pin2000 project with you guys.

I've developed my own complete tournament system with full compatibility to the existing pinball software that allows anyone with a Revenge from Mars game to particiapate in a worldwide tournament from the comfort of their own home. All you need is a network card in your rfm to get started, and a barcode reader for full participation.

To find out more visit my site http://www.mypinballs.com/tournament/ or drop me an email. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Also, I'd love to add new features for users of your system in the future by using the API you mention.

Cheers

Yes, saw your site from Chuck's post awhile back and was really impressed with what you've done. Keep up the great work. We've got a couple of hurdles to surpass to get networking done, but it's on our list of things we're hoping to include initially or at the least in future updates..

Cool, love to talk to you about the things i'd like to fix or find workarounds for in the original code.

applejuice wrote:Cool, love to talk to you about the things i'd like to fix or find workarounds for in the original code.

Keep in mind we can't change the original code (nor would we wish too even if possible)...

However, with our emulation/virtualization layer in place, we can often provide a lot more flexibility than the original offered, depending on the situation.

Don't know what you're trying to accomplish, but in general, we can probably do a lot of network stuff outside the original code and only pass in what it expects.

At the moment we don't have the SMC card emulated, in fact, we still need to get hold of a document for it which discusses it's registers so we can emulate it when we're ready.

Feel free to discuss anything you'd like either here or in private.

-Steve

Here's the data book for the SMC ethernet controller used in the 8416 network cards:

http://www.scoresaves.info/misc/SMC_83c795.pdf

Oh, and applejuice... your Technical Setup page gets off to a bad start:

An SMC8162T based serial card should be installed into one of the spare PCI slots in on the rfm computer motherboard.

Three errors in the first sentence: the part # of the ethernet card should be SMC8416T, it' not a "serial card", and it doesn't go in a PCI slot.

I'd love to see more info on that page... particularly about the barcode reader (why it's needed, what info it provides, etc.).

Thanks for the info Matt.

Thanks alot!! Looks like it's got a lot of juicy detail for what's needed , perhaps too much

Curious, is the 8416, based on the 83c795 (or in plain english, how come the #'s don't correlate?)

mattosborn wrote:Here's the data book for the SMC ethernet controller used in the 8416 network cards:

http://www.scoresaves.info/misc/SMC_83c795.pdf

Oh, and applejuice... your Technical Setup page gets off to a bad start:

An SMC8162T based serial card should be installed into one of the spare PCI slots in on the rfm computer motherboard.

Three errors in the first sentence: the part # of the ethernet card should be SMC8416T, it' not a "serial card", and it doesn't go in a PCI slot.

I'd love to see more info on that page... particularly about the barcode reader (why it's needed, what info it provides, etc.).

SMC 83c795 is the name of the controller chip used on the SMC 8416 EtherEZ ISA cards (8416T, 8416BT, 8416BTA). Other ethernet card manufacturers also use SMC controllers, although I haven't come across any other cards that use the 83c795.

mattosborn wrote:SMC 83c795 is the name of the controller chip used on the SMC 8416 EtherEZ ISA cards (8416T, 8416BT, 8416BTA). Other ethernet card manufacturers also use SMC controllers, although I haven't come across any other cards that use the 83c795.

Thanks, that's kind of what I assumed, but am glad to get clarification.

I picked up a couple of the SMC cards when I first purchased my RFM so I am good to go on that front.

Now on to the card reader: Where do I get one? I looked all over the place and the cheapest I could find was $75. Are there any suggested vendors?

Thanks,

Hank

I'm working on creating a list of supported readers and places to get them. You can test your system without the reader installed, as mentioned on my site. You will play as an anonymous user.

Getting a barcode scanner seems like overkill, unless you plan on having a bunch of people over for a tourney party, or you just like the whole badge concept. It's just RS232, so one could write a little program (or make a simple device) to send the same data that the barcode reader would. Can you tell us exactly what data is sent? (a sample from a card swipe would be great) I assume there's some kind of preamble, followed by the player data, and then a termination character. This info would be valuable to the nucore guys as well, as it should be fairly trivial to emulate that part so that everyone can participate in the online tournament (the harder part for them will be emulating the SMC ethernet card).

Getting a barcode scanner seems like overkill, unless you plan on having a bunch of people over for a tourney party, or you just like the whole badge concept

The barcode reader and swipe card is just one way to send the player id to my system. It is the player id that is important not the way it is submitted. I am using this method at present as it maintains the originality to the williams system and it is nice and easy to use.

The player id is simply a unique 8 digit number that is generated from your account registration on the website.

Been thinking about alternative ways to using a barcode reader and am going to add an option to automatically authenticate the main user by ip address if they don't have a barcode reader enabled. This means if people don't plan on having tournament parties and want an easy way to play themselves they can do so without an extra expense and all their scores will still be logged.

I still recommend the reader, a group of friends and a tournament party! I had one just the other day and it was a great laugh. The joy of not having to keep a manual tally was really nice...